How risky is temporarily moving high value SEO pages to a brand new domain?

I won't bore you with all the details but we may have to temporarily move part of an existing domain onto a separate domain for a couple of months. The content being moved includes most of our key branded and organic SERP pages. We've owned the new domain for years but it's never been live or indexed. After a couple of months, all the content will move back to the original domain but will move to a slightly different structure and different page names. Most of the page content will remain largely the same.

I"m concerned, but don't really have any experience with this kind of thing. Can anyone shed some light. Perhaps on a scale of 1 to 5 you could give me your thoughts:

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1. Should be fine, as long as you set up all the redirects properly

2.

3.

4.

5. Do everything in your power not to do it! Using the new domain and other factors will be problematic.

2 Responses

Without knowing more info, other than that it's for a few months, here's the problem with doing 301 Redirects.

301 Redirects say "permanently moved". So the old pages fall out, the new pages get indexed.

Then a few months later, you move them back but to new URLs. So you do 301 redirects from the other site back to the new site.

With each 301 redirect stage, you lose a little value for each page. Two hops in a few months is just as likely to cause authority and trust concerns as much as anything.

So the questions then become:

How much of the site is this happening to?

Can the site afford to lose the SEO value of those pages temporarily?

If the answer to how much is "not a major portion of the site", and the answer to the last one is "we'll survive", then the proper solution would be to do a 302 Temporarily moved". Then, when they move back, to the actual 301 - from the primary existing URLs on the main site to the new URLs on the main site.

Ouch. That's a tricky one, but a 302 is likely your best bet if you HAVE to move to the new domain and then move them back to new URLs on the old domain with a 301, but why do the middle step of moving these pages to the new domain? If you're going to put them on new URLs on the old domain, why not just create those URLs and move the pages there? Any competent developer should be able to work around having pages on a domain remain live while development takes place in the background. Really the only instance I could see of having to part with your domain for a few months is if you lost ownership of it, other than that, I'd do what I could to avoid bouncing around on domains, especially as far as a brand is concerned.